


of their own making

by thedevilchicken



Category: Black Sails
Genre: M/M, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:48:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22425832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: James wakes in a bed he hasn't slept in in years. If it's a dream, it's a vivid one; if it's, it makes no sense to him at all.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/John Silver, Past Thomas Hamilton/James McGraw - Relationship
Comments: 5
Kudos: 73
Collections: Past Imperfect Future Unknown 2019





	of their own making

**Author's Note:**

  * For [venndaai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/gifts).



They both have the names of saints. John Silver. James McGraw.

Once, he might have made something of that. Once, when he was young, when he was still Catholic at least in name, that might have meant something to him - or else he might have twisted it and turned it until he was convinced it did. Now, though he's not sure he'd say he's lost his faith completely, he knows it's just coincidence and nothing more. Now, as he opens the door of the room in which they never met, he knows if this is hell then it's a hell of their own making. 

"John," he says. 

"James," Silver replies. 

He stands aside and he lets him in. And, this time, he wonders if the way their lives unfold will be different. 

\---

The first time, he woke in a bed he hadn't slept in in years, in a room he knew but had never hoped to see again, hungover and not entirely sure what was happening. Frankly, _not entirely sure_ was an understatement of gargantuan proportions. If it was a dream, it was a vivid one. If it wasn't, it made no sense to him at all. 

When he looked in the mirror, his hair was tied back in a short queue from which it was quite far along in the process of escaping; when he'd lain down to sleep, his hair had still been shaved down close to his scalp and not falling loose into his eyes. When he'd lain down to sleep, his Navy uniform absolutely had not been laid out and waiting just across the room. He'd been fully dressed in black, minus his boots and coat. He'd been in a room above a tavern, yes, but not this one. He hadn't been in London. 

When Thomas swept in some time later, it was a moment beyond all belief. Thomas clucked his tongue at his bedraggled state of half-undress that he hadn't yet summoned the effort to rectify, but there was a smile turning the corners of his mouth. He tucked James' hair back behind his ears with his ink-stained fingers and he asked him what was wrong. 

"I dreamed that you were dead," James said, then wrapped his arms around him and held on. Thomas didn't tell him not to. And when James tugged him by his coat toward the bed, he let him do that, too. 

He remembered that day, and it hadn't gone so very differently. But, as they lay there afterwards, what he couldn't recall was its timing: had it been three days before they'd come for Thomas? Five? Was it a fortnight? He didn't think so, but how could he be sure when so long had passed and so much had happened? He turned it over in his head while Thomas dressed himself, but the truth was he didn't know. He remembered so much of that time so vividly, but in the years that had passed there were things he'd forgotten. Apparently the sequence of events was one such thing.

He's come to understand that even that day, Thomas' father knew what they'd been doing, and as they lay together he was taking steps to rectify the situation in the best way he knew how to. That first time, he asked Thomas to go away with him; he said no, no matter how he begged, and when they came for him James died as he tried to fend them off. The second time, he let them come, and afterwards he mounted an escape that failed and ended in his death. The fifth, a kidnap ended poorly. The tenth, when he told the truth, Thomas couldn't make himself believe. The look on his face said he wanted to, but nothing could persuade him. 

He lost count of his attempts. He lost count of how many times he hoped for a different outcome than the one he knew, and felt that this time it might work, only for his plans to fail again. When he spoke to Thomas of Nassau and the world that waited there, when he spoke to him of a life together far from London, Thomas smiled as if he knew that it could never happen; he called it a dream and James supposed it was. Better the dream than the look Thomas had when he told him about the man he'd be without him. Better than the dream than Thomas hearing the name _Flint_.

He lost count of his attempts. And then, because he wasn't sure he had the strength to fail again, he let it happen. He left London. He left England. He paid for passage across the channel and he drank for weeks in various Parisian taverns until his purse was empty and he couldn't go on. He'd been Catholic once, and felt suicide might well still be a mortal sin; that time, he started the fight that killed him. Twenty times later, though, forty times, mortal sin had seemed to lose its meaning. There was no meaning to be found that wasn't in a blade, or in a bottle, until he saw himself drunk and desperate in the shine of the moon on the Thames, one night out of hundreds. That could not be his eternity.

The next time, he took Miranda to Nassau. He allowed history to play out just as it had, the way that he remembered but that hadn't happened yet. He took captaincy of the _Walrus_. He killed Lord Hamilton on board the _Maria Alleyne_. And then, when he met John Silver for the second first time, that was when he knew. In a gutting, wrenching moment, that was when he knew. The weight of everything they'd done with and for and to each other hung there in the air between them, though it hadn't happened yet.

"I think we have something to talk about," James said. 

"I think that's an understatement," Silver replied. 

And they both knew that the page from the captain's logbook that Silver had taken from the cook, the ship's real cook, was entirely unnecessary to them. They both knew where they'd find the Urca gold without it. And the truth was neither was sure that they wanted to. 

Back on board the _Walrus_ , Silver washed the blood from James' face with a cloth he dipped in water. They talked about the things they'd tried. They talked about the times they'd woken up where they'd woken up with no memory of a death to take them there and understood, at least, that those times were one another's deaths. 

"I've no appetite for this," James said, at a table in the tavern back in Nassau once the two of them had shrugged off the crew. "I won't be the man I was." 

"And I won't lose my leg again," Silver replied. 

James nodded sharply. They shook on it, then they drank together in the tavern, voices low and heads bowed together, though no one there would understand the things they said. And when James went to his rented room, he took Silver with him. Years had passed since London and those years repetitions, longer still since the very start of it, but it still felt like betrayal when he pressed his mouth to Silver's throat, and not to tear it out. 

Guilt didn't stop him. Guilt didn't stop _them_. They pulled at one another's clothes with such fervour and such half-drunken incoordination that buttons shed across the floor, but that didn't stop them, either. In a bed very nearly as familiar as he'd had in London, Silver pulled him down into a kiss that felt quite like the odd culmination of every fight they'd ever had. When Silver let him have him, when Silver made it clear that that was what he had in mind, it wasn't much less like a fight. Silver's legs were too tight round his waist and Silver's arse was too tight around his prick and he knew by the time he might have been able to admit he'd wanted this in that time that hadn't happened yet, Silver would have had no interest. Time had changed that. Time had changed a lot, he thought, such as the two of them. When Silver bit his lip, James just laughed and fucked him harder, and knew that was precisely what he'd wanted.

James didn't ask him to leave when they were finished and Silver didn't volunteer to go. In the morning, they talked again once their heads had cleared of rum and sex, once Silver had ridden him in the thin morning light through the shabby tavern curtains, almost as if he did it just to prove he could. This was the future they'd both wished to avert; they agreed that living in it couldn't help. 

That afternoon, when they'd come to their decision, they each took up a pistol from the desk. Silver might have had his trust to some degree but they shot each other, not themselves. Just to make sure. 

\---

"John," he says, now they've met again, in this room in which they never met before. 

"James," Silver replies, and smiles wryly. He looks young, at least upon first glance, and James supposes he's lost years to match. He understands that in spirit they're both much older than they appear to be. They've both lived so many lives. 

They never met here, in James' room in London. They didn't meet until the seas off Nassau, and if by chance it had been London then then they would never have spared each other a first glance, let alone a second. But here they are, and they know each other. James knows John Silver. And Silver knows him in a way that Thomas never could and never will, because he knows the man he was and hopes he never will be. 

"What now?" Silver asks. 

James doesn't know; he can't pretend he has a plan when none exists. But they'll work it out together, or else they never will. 

What comes next will be precisely what they make of it.


End file.
